Fairyland

A Memoir of My Father

By Alysia Abbott

(Norton; 326 pages; $25.95)

"When I remember Dad now, I mostly remember his innocence."

"Fairyland," Alysia Abbott's memoir of her father, Steve, seeks to recover that innocence - not just of a father, but of a world.

Steve Abbott moved on the peripheries of San Francisco poetry. Throughout the 1970s, he wrote in the afterglow of the defining figures of the Bay Area literary scene: Jack Spicer, Robin Glaser and Robert Duncan. Reading and writing at Cloud House - part bookstore, part commune - Steve found his voice.

A gay man living at the heart of San Francisco's decade-long coming-out party, he shared in the creative activism of the age of Harvey Milk. And always at his side was his daughter Alysia, born in 1970, shorn of her mother by an accident when she was 3, constantly chronicling her dad's lives and loves.

Alysia beautifully remembers the innocence of the age between the disappearance of the Beats and the onset of AIDS. The Fairyland of her book's title thus alludes not simply to the magical life she led with her expressive father; it calls to mind the fantasy remembrance of a time before the streets of San Francisco ran with fear and fever.

And yet the innocence of childhood stands in sharp contrast to everyday reality. Readings at Cloud House and browsing days at City Lights were magical. But "poetry didn't clean up our apartment or wash out the crumbs and banana stench from my Scooby-Doo lunchbox."

Dad at his most creative was, she recalls, at his most "irritable ... notebook balanced on his lap, cigarette burning in the ashtray beside him."

The 1970s and '80s swing between these two poles of remembrance: precious moments of a man finding his voice and his self poised against the dirt of Haight-Ashbury's streets and the smell of a lunch box. Steve Abbott's poetry and letters, generously quoted in this book, reveal a man of profound sensitivities.

Responding to the gay bashing by Anita Bryant, Steve reads a poem on the local radio: "O Humanity! When will we ever learn the lessons of history?" Writing for Poetry Flash, a literary journal of the time and place, he records the disruptive visit of Gregory Corso (poet and confidant of Allen Ginsberg) to his own reading. Such chronicles, Alysia notes, got her dad renamed the "Hedda Hopper of the poetry world."

In that capacity, Steve published widely throughout the late '70s and early '80s. It barely paid the rent, but then again, "the social exchange between writers and editors, which valued ideas over economic concerns, helped build a culture that thrived on, and appreciated, art and thinking. It was one of the great things about this era of San Francisco. But we still needed to pay our bills."

Such is the theme of "Fairyland": the tension between joys of art and the demands of life, the split between the beauty of poetry and the crumbs in the lunch box.

Some of the best moments in this book thus write a history of San Francisco literary life along these axes. The so-called language poets of the period fascinate Steve and Alysia, especially with their heated, theory-driven debates. But, as Alysia notes, language poetry "was detached from everyday experience," and the many writers who once fascinated the young girl soon became tedious for the teenager.

"What kind of writer are you if no one's heard of you, and you make no money," she complains to her father. And soon, his "appetite for transgressive outsiders threatened my own sense of fragile identity."

As she remarks, in terms that resonate not simply with her own experience but with that moment in every child's life when a parent's magic dissipates: "There was a thin line between cool and weird and I didn't want to be on the weird side any more."

This is a book, therefore, about a young girl walking on that line. It yearns for innocence, yet fills its pages with the all-too-knowing. In one of the most subtle moments of reflection, Alysia recalls how she studied for the GRE as Steve lay sick with AIDS, trying to fill in the blanks. "Use the following words in a sentence: aberrant, faculties, assiduous," instructs the GRE manual, and Alysia begins, "For many, my father's was an aberrant lifestyle."

Was it for her? In the 20 years since Steve's death, Alysia seems to have succeeded as a writer, wife and parent living in Cambridge, Mass. Yet still, as she concludes, "I still feel a part of this queer community."

Her gift, in this book, lies in the skill to bring that old community to life: to turn the lights back on in Fairyland and to reveal that, for all of us of any time or place, whether our parents swanned as Hedda Hopper or fit cautiously into their flannel suits, we make our own queer communities.

Seth Lerer is dean of arts and humanities at UC San Diego and the author of the memoir "Prospero's Son: Life, Books, Love, and Theater." E-mail: books@sfchronicle.com

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